<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Writers like going to Oxford, Mississippi. They like going because of the hog-jowly food, because of the promises of fellowship, and because of Faulkner \u2014 because Faulkner&amp;#039;s house, Rowan Oak, is there, a few blocks away from the town square, with its courthouse and its inevitable monument to the Confederate cause. They like going because not only is there a first-rate bookstore on the town square, there&amp;#039;s a first-rate bookstore with a verandah, and it&amp;#039;s the closest thing to a writer&amp;#039;s clubhouse that the United States has to offer these days. And they like going, above all, because it&amp;#039;s so damn writerly \u2014 because somehow the seat of a mediocre public university, one that still wears proudly the trappings of its segregationist past, has evolved into a stage-set meant to flatter the delusion that literature is as central to the workings of America as real estate or gourmet coffee. To American writers, Oxford is not just a literary town; it&amp;#039;s an answer to the universe, a redress for old slights and a restoration of primacy: a town run as they would run it, and so the literary equivalent of a planned community like Celebration, Florida. It&amp;#039;s only after you spend a few days there that you realize how small it is, and that if what&amp;#039;s being proffered in Oxford is a lie, it&amp;#039;s a harmless one, a pretty one, and, above all, a white one. The problem, of course, is the writers themselves \u2014 the problem is that when you go to Oxford to meet writers, you succeed all too well. You meet writers, and then you meet them everywhere you go, and then you can&amp;#039;t get away from them. After a while, they seem as small as the town itself, or, worse, as small as you are, having sought literary experience in Oxford, instead of at your desk. Even Rowan Oak itself, that presumed infinity, is a curio of a place, bearing about the same relation to the estate of Faulkner&amp;#039;s imagination as the tiny dress-uniforms and frock-coats on display at the Smithsonian bear to the bloodlusts and manifest destinies of the men who wore them \u2014 on your second tour, you wonder how the hell a man like Faulkner fit into it, and you walk the picturesque streets of his little Mississippi postage-stamp determined to find not yet another &amp;quot;fellow-writer,&amp;quot; but an honest-to-goodness giant. I have to admit that when I finally found one, my first thought was obvious and shameful: Why, he&amp;#039;s the tiniest of all! It was the second day of my second visit in a year to Oxford, and I was on the second floor of the writer&amp;#039;s clubhouse, Square Books. I was anteing up for a gourmet coffee and angling for the verandah, when I heard, behind me, a voice I knew, a voice I&amp;#039;d heard before. Not in person; no, I&amp;#039;d only heard it when a friend who had once attended the Iowa Writer&amp;#039;s Workshop imitated its way of pronouncing judgment, its way of saying, of a polite short story my friend had written, &amp;quot;What that story needs is for someone to go out and keel somebody.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d only read it, in books like Airships and Ray and Geronimo Rex and The Tennis Handsome, but it was a voice that carried to your ear as soon as you encountered it on the page \u2014 a singer&amp;#039;s voice, sly and showy, irreducible in its promise of love and violence \u2014 and once you read it, you heard it well enough. It left a charge in the air, whether in books or in bookstores, and when I turned to around to see who was speaking it, I experienced both the shock of inevitability and the inevitability of shock \u2014 for the voice belonged to Barry Hannah, and Barry Hannah looked like a little old lady. Now, you have to understand: Barry Hannah was alive to me in a way that no writer has ever been, because he was my first living writer. I wasn&amp;#039;t even a writer when I first read him. I was a former English major, steeped in Hemingway and Faulkner, but I was making a living selling ladies&amp;#039; handbags, in Dallas, Texas, and watching Hemingway and Faulkner recede into the distance like the hitchhikers I passed by every day on the Texas roads I had to travel. It was 1980, and I was, I thought, at the end of something \u2014 at the end of my education, at the very least \u2014 when I walked into a bookstore next to a handbag store in a Dallas strip mall, picked up a paperback copy of Airships, a book of stories culled primarily from Esquire, and read &amp;quot;Coming Close to Donna,&amp;quot; which begins like this:  Fistfight on the old cemetery. Both of them want Donna, square off, and Donna and I watch from the Lincoln convertible. I&amp;#039;m neutral. I wear sharp clothes and everybody thinks I&amp;#039;m a fag, though it&amp;#039;s not true. The truth is, I&amp;#039;m not that crazy about Donna, that&amp;#039;s all, and I tend to be sissy of voice. Never had a chance otherwise \u2014 raised by a dreadfully vocal old aunt after my parents were killed by vicious homosexuals in Panama City. Further, I am fat. I&amp;#039;ve got fat ankles going into my suede boots.  I stood in the store and read the story to the end, where Hannah, true to his word, has the narrator go and keel somebody, in this case Donna, whose head he crushes with a tombstone. The whole thing was no more than three or four pages, and that was it for me \u2014 it was the first short story I&amp;#039;d ever read that was as good as a rock and roll song, and as savage. Indeed, Barry Hannah was, for me, the Velvet Underground of writers \u2014 the writer who convinced me to pick up the guitar, learn some chords, and give it a try. Of course, I could never sound like he did, any more than I could sound like Lou Reed, but I can chart my life as a writer by the writers who&amp;#039;ve inspired me to exclaim Hey, you can&amp;#039;t do that, as I&amp;#039;ve read them, and if the first, and grandest, was the Master of Rowan Oak, the second was Barry Hannah. You see, for an aspiring writer what Hey, you can&amp;#039;t do that translates into is the paradoxical assurance that Hey, I can, and it was Hannah&amp;#039;s sheer sense of license that caused me to read everything he&amp;#039;d written till then, and then to collect the stories of the people he&amp;#039;d terrorized over the years. He was a professor at the University of Alabama at that time, and he went on to teach at Iowa and, in the end, Mississippi, and he remained a figure of unique menace, an academic switchblade. It wasn&amp;#039;t simply that he was so often drunk and disorderly, favored a black leather jacket and motorcycles, and sometimes brought a gun to class; it was that the drunkenness was the handmaid of a vision and the vision a handmaid to a voice, and if he thought a student was wanting in either department, he could be as mean and lowdown as any of the characters his stories taught to sing. There was nothing more to his writing, really, than the need to be alive at any cost, and it&amp;#039;s the at any cost part that scared people to death. And then there he was, on the second floor of Square Books, in a town where writing had become both an industry and the prevailing choice of lifestyle. I had heard that he had been battling cancer, and had both dried out and gotten drunk on Jesus instead, but I had never expected to see a writer famed for his volatility on the page and feared for his nastiness in the symposium become so diminished, so neutered. He was as far gone as a maiden aunt. He was white-haired, and wearing glasses over his slitty, Injun eyes. He was wearing a red-plaid flannel shirt and gray sweat pants, and he looked like Norman Bates&amp;#039;s mother, as played by a bewigged Barry Hannah instead of Anthony Perkins. And he wasn&amp;#039;t just small \u2014 he was homuncular, a scale model of a man in the same way that Oxford is the scale model of a literary center. You wanted to carry him. I was with two fellow-writer friends, and one of them, the novelist Charles McNair, studied with Hannah at Alabama, and was friends with him, until a falling-out. Charles was wary of his former teacher, like everybody else, but Hannah welcomed him and we sat with him for more than an hour, this exemplar of resistance and ruin who against all odds spoke as he wrote, with the same sidelong music. The first thing he said to me was this: &amp;quot;I had a face like yours once. I miss it.&amp;quot; A kid from the university sat with us and mentioned that the United States had fired a rocket at the ice on the moon, and Hannah said, &amp;quot;The universe has left us alone, why can&amp;#039;t we do the same for it?&amp;quot;, and somehow the kid never said another word. And when, for some reason, Jay McInerney&amp;#039;s name came up, Hannah said, &amp;quot;A subminor actor on TV could be his destiny.&amp;quot; He took his time to answer any question posed to him, and in the time we sat with him never uttered a clich\u00E9 or a commonplace. &amp;quot;This is the best I&amp;#039;ve seen him in years,&amp;quot; Charles said when his teacher got tired and we got up to go And now four-and-a-half months later, the teacher is dead.  After the business with the tombstone at the end of &amp;quot;Coming Close to Donna,&amp;quot; the narrator says, &amp;quot;Some of us are made to live for a long time. Others for a short time. Donna wanted what she wanted.&amp;quot; And then, after a paragraph break: &amp;quot;I gave it to her.&amp;quot; Barry Hannah was sixty-seven when he died, and he sure as hell gave me what I wanted when I visited Oxford \u2014 what every writer wants, when he makes a pilgrimage to a place like that: the validation of meeting the man who sent him on his way. But he had already given me what I wanted, what I needed, when I first read him at a bookstore in Dallas, with a sample case of handbags heating up in the car: the idea that what makes a writer is not sense, but sound. There was no one who ever sounded like Barry Hannah, and he taught me well enough that the sound is going to be what survives, even when you wind up in Oxford, and it&amp;#039;s smaller than you think. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7046/barry-hannah-obituary-030210/>